Social media in democratic transitions and consolidations: what can we learn from the case of Tunisia?

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of social media in the stages of uprising, democratic transition and democratic consolidation using the case study of Tunisia. While the impact of social media in uprisings has been widely documented in past research about the MENA region, Tunisia provides new evidence to the use of Internet in the processes of democratisation. Consequently, this research focuses in detail on the benefits but also the pitfalls of social media in transitions and consolidations. Data collection was based on interviews with Tunisian social media activists. The analysis is valuable to social media practitioners and researchers alike

Research Directions for Service-Oriented Multiagent Systems

Today\u27s service-oriented systems realize many ideas from the research conducted a decade or so ago in multiagent systems. Because these two fields are so deeply connected, further advances in multiagent systems could feed into tomorrow\u27s successful service-oriented computing approaches. This article describes a 15-year roadmap for service-oriented multiagent system research

UDRIVE D13.1 Legal Recommendations on Study Participants' Agreements

The UDRIVE project intends to carry out a Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) which is not meant to evaluate certain technical functions or in-vehicle prototype systems but it focuses on naturalistic driving in public traffic. It is intended to collect and process video data by means of cameras installed in the study vehicles. So the UDRIVE project will include the collection and processing of data referring to the driver, possibly referring to passengers in the vehicle and possibly referring to other road users outside the study vehicle. The issues legally relevant for study execution (data privacy, criminal law, liabilities, ethical approval – if applicable) are not only subject to EU legislation but still are subject to national legislation and, accordingly, will differ to some degree between the EU Member States. Work Package (WP) 1.3 called “Recommendations on Legal Issues” and has elaborated recommendations specifically focussed on those legal areas that should be addressed by an agreement with the study participants, thereby leaving it open how this should be done in detail. Therefore, WP 1.3 has included the identification of subject matters to be regulated in the respective agreements as well as recommendations concerning the contents of those agreements. The latter had to take into account the aspect that the details of the respective national legislations of the Operation Sites (OS) may vary and differ considerably. Consequently, the recommendations cannot cover the different national legal specifics in detail. Hence, before data collection starts, it is recommended to consider and adapt the issues identified at the level of OS, taking into account the specific features of the respective national legislation. It is thereby recommended to involve legal experts at national level. The document at hand prepares the legal issues of relevance for participant agreements by combining knowledge on the technical and legal context. This will allow for speedy adaptation to national specifics. It is pointed out that not all legal issues that might occur in the UDRIVE project can be addressed by means of participants´ agreements. Other legal issues need be taken care of independently during project execution

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7